Finding the connected components of a graph is a fundamental
problem with uses throughout computer science and engineering. A recent survey by Sahu et al.  [1]} of industrial uses of algorithms reports that, for both practitioners and academic researchers, connected components was the most frequently performed computation from a list of 13 fundamental graph problems that includes shortest paths, triangle counting, and minimum spanning trees. It has applications in scientific computing [2]}, [3]}, flow simulation [4]}, metagenome assembly [5]}, [6]}, identifying protein families [7]}, [8]}, analyzing cell networks [9]}, pattern recognition [10]}, [11]}, graph partitioning [12]}, [13]}, random walks [14]}, social network community detection [15]}, graph compression [16]}, [17]}, medical imaging [18]}, and object recognition [19]}. It is a starting point for strictly harder problems such as edge/vertex connectivity, shortest paths, and \(k\) -cores. It is used as a subroutine for pathfinding algorithms such as Djikstra and \(A^*\) , some minimum spanning tree algorithms, and for many approaches to
clustering [20]}, [21]}, [21]}, [23]}, [24]}, [24]}.
